Government ignoring U.K.’s lessons by rejecting C-22 amendments: NDP

The NDP is accusing the government of “flying by the seat of its pants” by rejecting amendments proposed by the opposition to C-22, legislation to create a national security oversight committee of parliamentarians.

Speaking in a press conference Thursday morning, NDP justice critic Murray Rankin and public safety critic Matthew Dube criticized the government for ignoring the amendments proposed during a committee review of the bill in December 2016. Rankin also said the government is ignoring the lessons shared by the chair of the United Kingdom’s national security review committee during his visit last year.

“They did not listen to the lessons from the U.K. and it seems we’re going to be compelled to do [those lessons] again and not learn from the experience that the U.K. Parliament would have taught us,” said Rankin.

The opposition called for significant amendments to the bill — the key one being the deletion of a section that outlines a blanket ban on committee access to seven categories of information, replacing it with a clause giving the committee the right to access any government information that doesn’t link back to an active national security activity.

The opposition also called for a change that would require the committee to state in its final reports whether there had been redactions made to the reports by the prime minister, who holds the right to withhold security information from Parliament.

Dominic Grieve, the Conservative MP who serves as chair of the U.K.’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), visited Ottawa for two days of meetings with Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale and members of the House of Commons and Senate national security and defence committees about the ISC’s work and shared national security concerns.

His visit, along with seven other members of the ISC, followed up on a visit by Goodale in January 2016 to learn more about how the committee operates; the U.K. committee was a model for the Trudeau government’s committee design.

In an interview he gave to iPolitics at the time, Grieve stressed that building trust among parliamentarians and Canadians would be the biggest challenge for the government.

He said the legacy of national security activities over the past fifteen years has heightened distrust between the public and governments — and that if Canada’s new committee is anything like the ISC, it will need a careful balance between cooperation and independence to prove its worth to the public and to partner agencies within the government.

“Trust issues in the United Kingdom have also come under a lot of pressure. The consequences of our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq with the United States have raised troubles and tension, and our implication in U.S. detention and rendition is one of the inquiries we’re currently carrying out. We also know that throughout the western democracies generally there is a breakdown in trust between the public and politicians,” said Grieve.

“One of the problems which I think you’re inevitably going to have in starting the committee is that agencies and government will have legitimate anxieties — is this all going to go horribly wrong for us?”

Both the NDP and Conservatives stressed during C-22’s time in committee that it did not make sense to start by allowing the government to appoint the chair as well as the members, and to put in place stringent restrictions on a broad category of information the committee will not be allowed to review.

While that model mimicked the original mandate of the U.K.’s ISC, Westminster realized it was not working the way it should in 2013 and overhauled the committee’s mandate to allow the committee members to elect their own chair, and to increase the powers of the committee and the breadth of information it can request.

The government has said repeatedly that this mandate is a starting point and that setting core restrictions will give them a framework to determine what can be changed when the bill is reviewed after three years.

Goodale’s office said in a statement provided to iPolitics that C-22 does take into account the lessons of the ISC and Grieve’s advice to start by building up trust and leaving room to grow and adjust.

“We’re actually starting quite big, because the Canadian committee will have more teeth and more access than its U.K. counterpart,” said spokesperson Scott Bardsley. “The U.K. committee only has the authority to examine the work of three specific agencies. It needs a Memorandum of Understanding with the PM to examine anything beyond that. By contrast, the Canadian version will be able to look at any activity of government, in any department or agency, related to intelligence and national security.”

But Rankin and Dube said ignoring the amendments essentially sets the committee up to fail.

“It is critical that this committee have bipartisan support. With the amendments, it did,” said Dube. “Now the government has decided for inexplicable reasons to go back on that, and that’s something that we are disappointed about but we have that sliver of hope that they will see reason.”